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Winterkewl cancels crowdfunded Yogscast game

Yogventures now in the hands of the popular YouTube channel, backers offered free copy of TUG instead

Winterkewl Games has cancelled its crowdfunded debut project, Yogventures, which was affiliated with the popular YouTube channel, the Yogscast.

According to a statement from Winterkewl's Kris Vale, one of Yogventures' lead developers, all work completed to date has been handed to The Yogscast, which will decide what to do with the project from here. Vale also said that Winterkewl, which has a team of six people, may ultimately go out of business as a result.

Yogventures raised more than $560,000 on a target of $250,000, but what Vale described as, "a lack of experience in planning and managing a project of this scope proved too much for our little team." Vale actually invested $25,000 of his own money to keep work going, but Winterkewl was unable to reach the right standard of quality to start raising money from pre-orders - which Vale suggests was a part of the model all along.

"If we would have limited the scope and made a solid plan for working more closely with the Yogscast I have every faith this project would have been a real stand-out achievement in the Indie Game world," he said. "However, if you promise the world and don't take into account the amount of time and resources you really need to make good on those promises you find yourself in a position where you can't move forward without more funds but you can't generate more funds without moving forward.

"That's what happened, and I had to make the call that it's for the good of the project that we at Winterkewl step aside and allow the game to be taken over by a larger team. That's why we have turned everything over to the Yogscast. With their resources and connections in the gaming world, I still believe this game could be really great."

According to Eurogamer, The Yogscast co-founder Lewis Brindley has sent an email to Yogventures' 13,647 backer, pledging to "make this right" while giving precious few details on the nature of that plan. Brindley described Winterkewl's decision to step away from the project as, "actually a good thing," but did not commit to taking development any further.

One outstanding issue is the various rewards tied to the Kickstarter campaign's various pledge tiers, which included t-shirts, soundtrack CDs, custom in-game characters and items, and copies of the finished game. In his email, Brindley indicated that The Yogscast would endeavour to find alternative rewards, and offered all backers a free Steam key for the Early Access game TUG.

"Although we're under no obligation to do anything, instead we're going to do our best to make this right, and make you really glad you backed the project," Brindley said in the email.

Winterkewl has pledged to release a detailed account of how every cent of the money it raised through Kickstarter was used as soon as The Yogscast makes its plans for Yogventures known.

Really Matthew?
These things happen all the time but using it's hidden away from us under the cover of a publisher dealing with the developer. Here though the publisher was effectively the crowd.
It won't kill crowd funding anymore than a bad hair cut stops people going to the hair dresser. You just have to be careful who you pledge your money to and accept there will always be risks.

As disappointing as this may be, especially for bakers, i do appreciate Winterkewl's honesty in admitting their own faults (instead of making up lame excuses and looking for scapegoats).
You know? This is the kind of behavior that tells you they actually learned from the mistakes they made, which is what makes one worthy of a second chance.

An MMO of that scale and feature set...made by 6! people....on a budget THAT small?

Anyone with an iota of experience in the industry and field could have told them that it was never going to happen. And this is the problem with Kickstarter and early access as well. The general public are being exposed to what game development really is. Games get cancelled. Inexperienced teams bite off more than they can chew. Games take much longer to make than people realise. There aren't always significant updates every week to keep people happy. But give them the promise of the "perfect game" and funding will come flooding in.

The general public are being exposed to what game development really is.

Which is what's needed. Educate the public on costs, development time, budgeting issues, and you'll have less Kickstarters taking advantage of the ignorance of gamers. Certainly some "questionable" games will still make it through KS, but it'll be less. People can't lay the blame entirely on gamers, when publishers/developers are so reticent to post development costs and post-mortems on development.

Edited 1 times. Last edit by Morville O'Driscoll on 18th July 2014 12:26pm